Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Saturday, June 20, 2020

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1950 - Darwin Among the Machines - Hodge Podge 2006.20


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1950 - Darwin Among the Machines - Hodge Podge 2006.20

There's so much going on in the world that is upsetting, disgusting, and enraging. Outrage is a commodity. 

Also, after the news went down about one of my idols, WARREN ELLIS, as per my post yesterday (linked there), i am seeing very upsetting outcries of "cancel culture" of which I am not a fan: CANCEL CULTURE TOO FAR. The analogy is not fully applicable, but it's one aspect of how I feel about cancel culture. And yet, the issue is so complicated. I hate seeing people who are talented like Warren Ellis lose their livelihoods and so I hope that does not happen. However, the reports of his actions are vile and reprehensible and need to be confronted and exposed.

So there's that.

And I am sharing some content created by Warren Ellis here, and I am not apologizing for doing so. For one thing, I copied in that material to share it before the news of his behavior began to circulate, but even so, I do not feel that this content and that news are connected such that the material is now inappropriate.

And so before we really get into the think of the outrage, how about some levity? I have taken a picture of myself in my messy office with the latest issue of Mad Magazine that is mentioned here in tribute to the great Al Jaffee.

Welcome to the weekly Hodge Podge. Here's maybe not all the things that caught my eye this week but many of them with a few notes from my here and there.

An article by my good friend George Gene Gustines:




And then, to keep things light, at least to start, the Fifth Dimension was trending this week on Twitter just because.



OTHER STUFF:




And then this is freaking hilarious:





So let's hit some of the outrage square in the bull's eye and there's lots more to follow:

https://www.wonkette.com/john-bolton-book-excerpts-are-dropping-and-they-are-bugf-ck

The Washington Post starts its report on Bolton's book with a heartwarming anecdote about Trump trying to get Chinese President Xi Jinping to help steal him the election:
During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi complained to Trump about China critics in the United States. But Bolton writes in a book scheduled to be released next week that "Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats.

"He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China's economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win," Bolton writes. "He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump's exact words but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise."












The thing is... I do not think this next message is a joke...


















Twitter flags Trump tweet featuring fakeCNN chyron as 'manipulated media'
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 06/18/20 10:42 PM EDT


Twitter has flagged a tweet from President Trump as containing “manipulated media” after the president tweeted a clip of a black toddler and a white toddler edited to include a CNN chyron reading “terrified todler[sic] runs from racist baby.”
The initial video, which was widely circulated online long before the tweet, shows the two children running towards each other and embracing.
It has been edited to include ominous background music and the fictitious CNN headline. The video reverts to the original clip midway through, cutting to a title reading “America is not the problem. Fake news is.”
“This tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill.
In a statement directly addressing Trump, a CNN spokesperson noted that the network covered the footage of the two New York children when it first went viral in 2019 under the headline "These two toddlers are showing us what real-life besties look like."
"CNN did cover this story — exactly as it happened. Just as we reported your positions on race [and poll numbers]," the network said in a statement. "We’ll continue working with facts rather than tweeting fake videos that exploit innocent children. We invite you to do the same. Be better."
The tweet marks the third time the social media platform has flagged a tweet by the president.
On the first occasion, Twitter appended the president's comments on mail-in voting, a frequent topic for Trump, as containing misinformation about an election.
Shortly thereafter, the social platform flagged a second tweet about unrest after the death of George Floyd that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” as promoting violence.
Trump has pushed back sharply against flags from the platform, announcing an executive order shortly after the first time a tweet was flagged that directed the federal government to consider removing some of social media platforms’ legal protections.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by contrast, has said he does not consider it within the website’s purview to fact-check or remove political content.

ASENION - Darwin Among The Machines (OFFICIAL LYRIC VIDEO) - YouTube
https://youtu.be/CGMGu1372uo

George Dyson from Darwin Among the Machines
“In the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines” (qtd in Joy, 7).


Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired. January, 2000. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/






Black people are tired of trying to explain racism


TWO EXCERPTS:

Explaining racism is exhausting. It’s exhausting to explain to people who don’t believe you, or who look at you with blank expressions. Or, worse, who ask, “How do you know that happened because of race?”



In Tulsa, we see two young, black boys walking in a quiet street — as they should be able to during summer in a “free” country — when an officer suddenly slams them to the ground and searches them. “Why are you touching me like that?” one yells, as the officer pats the teen down near his front pocket. Then the officer unclips the cuffs and says he is free to go.
But the officer just took the teen’s freedom. The humiliation of arrest destroys innocence.
Last week, I saw news that two young black men were found hanging from trees in California. No, I think. This can’t be true. I search The Post to see whether it was true. It is.
This scares me. I'm in tears.






Why it’s so important that Juneteenth become a national holiday

I wasn't always taught my history, but when I learned it, that knowledge changed my life. Celebrating Juneteenth can change how we understand America.
By Usher Raymond IV ●  Read more »
There has never been a more urgent time than now to get this done. On Thursday, Sens. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) announced that they are introducing legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Congress must pass this bill immediately.
As we celebrate today, let’s stay open to possibility. Let’s support black-owned businesses today and every day. Let’s uplift our resilient history. Let’s honor our people. Happy Juneteenth, America.



OH WOW: In our continuing series on haters who hate because of the hate they hate to feel and still hate anyway, this:

The Uncensorship Project

The Skepchick Network's "censored" comments finally revealed in their appropriate context:
Old-timey photos. Trigger warning for hate speech and rape and death threats.


https://theuncensorshipproject.tumblr.com/ via skepchick

 HOLY SHIT.








... and so many more...


WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.

Data can be found here, as always:

COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

This is also a good data site:

Worldometer - Coronavirus info

 There's still a pandemic... and lots of other stuff to be outraged about...


7 Tweets That Perfectly Sum Up What JK Rowling Gets Wrong About Trans People
The author was called out on the social media platform after tweeting more transphobic statements.
BY SOPHIE SAINT THOMAS
June 10, 2020

JK Rowling at a premiere

https://www.allure.com/story/jk-rowling-transphobic-tweets


Even with all that's going on in the world right now, JK Rowling, beloved author of the Harry Potter franchise that so many of us grew up with, seemingly had nothing better to do this week than blast some (more) transphobic tweets to her 14.5 million followers.


















There's a lot to unpack here. To start, “biological sex” refers to what the hospital fills in on your birth certificate based on your genitals, which is a creepy sentence to type and demonstrates how oddly our society deals with sex and gender. What Rowling is failing to understand here is that gender has nothing to do with genitals (which are no one's business), and that it also has nothing. to do with what was marked on a piece of paper at a person's birth. A person's gender is personal, and on their own experience within their body. 










Fans of the Lebanese group Mashrou’ Leila waved rainbow flags at their concert in Cairo in 2017. 


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/world/middleeast/egypt-gay-suicide-sarah-hegazi.html

Arrested for Waving Rainbow Flag, a Gay Egyptian Takes Her Life

Charged with “inciting debauchery,” Sarah Hegazi was jailed and tortured.


EXCERPT:

Days later, armed security officials arrived at Ms. Hegazi’s home and took her to a detention center run by the National Security Agency, a feared arm of Mr. el-Sisi’s security apparatus. Officers questioned her religious beliefs and asked if she was a virgin.
She was blindfolded and taken to a foul-smelling interrogation room where she could hear people groaning with pain. A piece of cloth was stuffed into her mouth. She was tortured with electric shocks, she later said in interviews.
An interrogator challenged her to prove that homosexuality was not a disease. “One time he likened Communism to homosexuality,” she wrote in an article for Mada Masr, an independent news media outlet. “Another time he sarcastically asked why homosexuals don’t sleep with children or animals.”
Later, Ms. Hegazi was taken to a police station where she was charged with “inciting debauchery.” In her cell, other female prisoners, encouraged by the police, molested her, she said.
She was transferred to Qanatir prison, north of Cairo, and placed in solitary confinement. Outside, the harshest crackdown in years against Egypt’s gay community was underway.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/16/2337251/americans-are-the-unhappiest-theyve-been-in-50-years

Americans Are the Unhappiest They've Been In 50 Years (go.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the it's-been-a-rough-year dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News:It's been a rough year for the American psyche. Folks in the U.S. are more unhappy today than they've been in nearly 50 years. This bold -- yet unsurprising -- conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% of American adults say they're very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they'd often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that. The survey, conducted in late May, draws on nearly a half-century of research from the General Social Survey, which has collected data on American attitudes and behaviors at least every other year since 1972. No less than 29% of Americans have ever called themselves very happy in that survey.The poll has revealed some other interesting findings. It says that the public is less optimistic today about the standard of living improving for the next generation than it has been in the past 25 years.

Americans are also less likely to report some types of emotional and psychological stress reactions following the COVID-19 outbreak, and about twice as many Americans report being lonely today as in 2018.

You can read the full study here (PDF).
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/16/2229243/scientists-say-most-likely-number-of-contactable-alien-civilizations-is-36


Scientists Say Most Likely Number of Contactable Alien Civilizations Is 36 (theguardian.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the testing-testing-1-2-3 dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would need to be known to come up with an estimate for the number of intelligent civilizations out there. These factors ranged from the the average number of stars that form each year in the galaxy through to the timespan over which a civilization would be expected to be sending out detectable signals.

But few of the factors are measurable. "Drake equation estimates have ranged from zero to a few billion [civilizations] -- it is more like a tool for thinking about questions rather than something that has actually been solved," said Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of the research. Now Conselice and colleagues report in the Astrophysical Journal how they refined the equation with new data and assumptions to come up with their estimates. "Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution," said Conselice.

The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. "[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilizations within our galaxy," he said. Under the strictest set of assumptions -- where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion years after star formation -- there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. But Conselice noted that this figure is conservative, not least as it is based on how long our own civilization has been sending out signals into space -- a period of just 100 years so far. The team add that our civilization would need to survive at least another 6,120 years for two-way communication."They would be quite far away ... 17,000 light years is our calculation for the closest one," said Conselice. "If we do find things closer ... then that would be a good indication that the lifespan of [communicating] civilizations is much longer than a hundred or a few hundred years, that an intelligent civilization can last for thousands or millions of years. The more we find nearby, the better it looks for the long-term survival of our own civilization."

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/14/2336219/looking-at-an-alien-sky-new-horizons-probe-sees-stars-from-a-new-view

'Looking at an Alien Sky': New Horizons Probe Sees Stars From a New View (space.com)

Posted by EditorDavid  from the twinkle-twinkle dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader JoeRobe writes:Space.com and other outlets are reporting on new pictures of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri sent back from New Horizons. The images show clear parallax between the view from Earth and from the spacecraft 6.9 billion km away. In effect, New Horizons is looking up at a visually different star field than we are... NASA has even created stereoscopic pairs to get a 3D view.
"It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in a statement, according to Space.com:New Horizons captured the imagery on April 22 and April 23, when the probe was more than 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That's so far away that it took 6.5 hours for the data containing the photos, moving at the speed of light, to travel from New Horizons to mission scientists' inboxes... The parallax demonstration was not done for scientific purposes, Stern told Space.com (though he did note that the New Horizons imagery might find its way into textbooks that discuss the parallax effect). Rather, the main goal was public outreach and engagement, and a desire to provide us all with some cosmic poetry and perspective.

We could get more such demonstrations, and much more data, from New Horizons in the coming years. The probe remains in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another object in the 2020s, if a suitable target can be found and NASA approves another mission extension, Stern and other team members have said.
On Friday five New Horizons scientists answered questions on Reddit, including New Horizons contributing scientist and astrophysicist Brian May (also a guitarist for the rock group Queen).

The team pointed out they could hypothetically maintain communication with their interplanetary space probe until it's 200 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. (It's currently just 47 times as far...) "But power will run out before we get that far...somewhere near 100 times."

Young US Men Having a Lot Less Sex In the 21st Century, Study Shows

Trump Hasn't Followed Through On Plan To Withdraw US From WHO

How an Online Mob Doxxed an Innocent Man

Can SpaceX's Starlink Broadband System Deliver Less Than 100ms Latency?

Interview with the Science Writer Who Predicted the Pandemic 8 Years Ago

Spies Can Eavesdrop By Watching a Light Bulb's Vibrations

Software Defined Radio Site Closes

Python Overtakes Java? JetBrains Releases 'State of Developer Ecosystem' Survey

Chemical Engineers Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Useful Industrial Materials

Twitter Deletes Over 170,000 Accounts Tied To Chinese Propaganda Efforts

Today’s Ambient: They grasp and fight for wealth as the whole world burns, Elbrus


WARREN ELLISSCORE

Name-your-price digital EP. Remarkable atmospherics.

Hardly More Than A Sign


WARREN ELLISLINKS AND BOOKMARKS

In 1928, the poet Paul Valรฉry had a vision of the future: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”
I copied this quote into my notebook five years ago, and it knocks me over each time I come across it. Today we can let the entire world—and everyone’s opinions about it—into our heads with a swipe or a click. Of course we’re going to feel a little crazy. Sometimes my mind lands on a jittery thought: screens have become our reality and the physical world simply exists to serve their needs. It’s more of a loopy sensation than a coherent idea, but I clearly need to step up my information hygiene.
@MrJamesReeves
Need



















Quotebacks


WARREN ELLISTHE ISLES OF BLOGGING
“Quotebacks is a tool that makes it easy to grab snippets of text from around the web and convert them into embeddable blockquote web components.” It’s a Chrome extension. And it works in the Custom HTML block of WordPress, outputting like this:

Quotebacks is a tool that makes it easy to grab snippets of text from around the web and convert them into embeddable blockquote web components.
Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin
Quotebacks
Go to text →
Which I find very clever and very useful. It presents nicely and speeds up certain of my operations here. Nice work.


I love her stuff so much. (link)




John Coulthart’s { feuilleton }


WARREN ELLISTHE ISLES OF BLOGGING
Artist/designer John Coulthart’s journal — and I must have some of John’s earliest work, with Savoy, in the office here — is now his main channel, and he’s increasing his posting velocity. feuilleton has been a favourite for years, and I’m very happy to see more of John’s seeing and thinking.



I Am Still Looking For A New House: 1


WARREN ELLISLINKS AND BOOKMARKS
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series I Am Still Looking For A New House
“An abandoned manor in the Tver region.” Ir0n4ss on IG.

















I Am Still Looking For A New House: 2


WARREN ELLISLINKS AND BOOKMARKS
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series I Am Still Looking For A New House
(ir0n4ss, link)
THIS IS SO COOL!!!


https://quotebacks.net/

https://quotebacks.net/welcome.html


Hi! Here's a brief tutorial about how to start using Quotebacks.
Quotebacks are like quote-retweets for any piece of writing on the internet, using simple web-native technology. here's what one looks like:

The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says: “Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.”
Toby Shorin
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
Go to text →
Try creating one yourself. highlight the paragraph below, then press
Mac: ⌘+shift+s   Windows: ctrl+shift+s
The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says: “Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.”
Nice. You can change the title and author, if you want.
Now, click the <> Embed button and you'll copy a nice block of HTML. Paste that into your blog post to get a quoteback like the one above.
Quoteback Library
Every quote you save is stored in your Quoteback Library, which lives in your Chrome local storage.

You can get to your Quoteback library by clicking the Quoteback icon in your Chrome toolbar:

Quotebacks can be used anywhere a normal block quote might go. They help give added context, structured metadata, and better linking back to the original author. we've found them to be really useful for:
  1. quoting other people at length when writing online (here's an example in a post by Tom).
  2. quoting yourself in your own blog posts - sometimes you've written the perfect thing already. (here's an example in a post by Toby.)
  3. quoting text that wouldn't traditionally be quoted - we were amazed by Sonya Mann's quoteback of this YouTube comment!
So what next?
One thing to could try right now is generating a Quoteback for a block quote in one of your own blog posts!
let us know how you go with it, and email us at tjcritchlow@gmail.com / tobyshorin@gmail.com if you need anything.

Looks like this:


Is the answer to “cancel” Warren Ellis? Maybe; it’s an understandable impulse. But at the same time, it’s difficult to also throw out the good he’s done; the WEF was not just a force that advanced comics and pop culture to where we are today but a place that many of us loved and still love. It was a place where we made friendships that have lasted to this day, where careers were launched — including mine. It’s painful to look back and have the shadow of his behavior taint everything. Was THIS event or THAT behavior something innocent, or was it a clue that we should have seen? Was this person kicked from the group because they were a troublemaker and a creep, or were they calling attention to something that Ellis would’ve preferred remain unremarked on? Or, worse, were they a threat to Uncle Warren’s desire to bring some new young woman under his influence?




However, the fact that it’s hard doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it anyway. The fact that it takes time doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t start now. And the fact that changing an industry — and other industries that face the same problems and bad actors — is an almost Sisyphean task doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t grit our teeth and start rolling the rock up that hill.
If we’re going to start, we should start with ourselves. Look around. Examine the people in your life, in your communities. Are there warning signs that you’ve missed? Is there a “missing stair” in your community that has thus far been allowed to remain? The sooner we do the work within ourselves and our own communities, the sooner we change geek culture… and make it the place we’ve always pretended it was.



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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2006.20 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1814 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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